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Not having actual cards is one thing - though actually I personally have a bunch of various cards (GPU, controllers, NIC, ...) ranging from old ISA, VLB, PCI, AGP to modern PCI. Most of them bought used on ebay when they were cheap. And they don't use that much space.
But having lost the specs sounds ridiculous.
Anyway happy to see some old boards receiving love.

Comment

Not having actual cards is one thing - though actually I personally have a bunch of various cards (GPU, controllers, NIC, ...) ranging from old ISA, VLB, PCI, AGP to modern PCI. Most of them bought used on ebay when they were cheap. And they don't use that much space.
But having lost the specs sounds ridiculous.
Anyway happy to see some old boards receiving love.

It's not that the specs are lost, it's generally that they've been moved off to tape or some other high latency storage medium that which makes them much harder to access. Couple that with the fact that most people internally are working on unreleased hardware or the current generation of hardware and it's not real easy to ask someone if they remember how some feature worked or where the docs are for an 8 year old (10 years old internally) chip. As for cards, I'm sure they are probably a few old cards around in various labs, but as I said before, most people aren't working on old stuff. Most of the open source developers work remotely so we can't just swing by the lab and dig around for some old card and you can't buy them new.